YouTube has finally launched its much-trailed āPlayablesā offering, a selection of games you can play directly within YouTube. Why does this exist? Maybe a big launch exclusive? Perhaps something that will rival the consoles? Free stuff you canāt get elsewhere? Nope.
You might not have heard, but gaming is big business. The games industry dwarfs movies in terms of revenue and audiences, despite the peculiar refusal of all other media to acknowledge its ubiquitous existence. Any corporation that has a requirement to make numbers go up wants to figure out a way to get a slice of that enormous, bulging pie. Hence why we see the weird, confusing efforts from Amazon and Netflix to try to be involved, and now YouTube too.
Except YouTube is exhibiting some big boomer energy with its delivery. If you visit the Playables page (which is available in most of the world now, but not everywhere), you could be forgiven for thinking youād accidentally clicked on a Wayback link for an early iteration of Kongregate. Itās woeful stuff, with scrappy logos for generic-sounding casual games with names like ā8 Ball Billiards Classicā and āBubble Pop Star.ā
Hidden in the list of over 75 games are some names youāve heard of. Thereās Angry Birds Showdown, which to be scrupulously fair, is a Playables exclusive, the 35,821st iteration of the franchise originally announced in 2019 for mobile, and seemingly once a Facebook Messenger app? Thereās also 2010’s Cut the Rope, and, er, 2018’s Words of Wonder? Iām struggling to find anything else notable.
But if what youāre after is a large selection of solitaire games to play in your browser, then welcome to Yahoo Games for the new millennium! Itās even got that classic Wordle rip-off called Hurdle that appears on The Washington Post. Some of these games will be distracting in the way casual games are supposed to be, but Iām at a loss as to what YouTube thinks itās offering here that every other site isnāt.
The games run in your browser, like youāre used to, but this time youāre playing Gin Rummy or Lunch Box Ready with a YouTube URL? Itās bewildering that this could go live without some big-name mobile games beyond a long-forgotten Angry Birds variant, and itās just wildly unclear what this actually exists for, beyond something else into which Google can stick irritating adverts.
